DAILY MAIL: Even by the standards of medical horror stories that have filled our papers of late, it's a tale that beggars belief. According to the latest figures, some 24 women have recently had their virginities "restored", not by some divine miracle or act of magic, but by a surgical procedure paid for by our already hard-pressed National Health Service.
How ridiculous, how dangerous and how indefensible. At a time when cancer and Alzheimer's patients are routinely deprived of drugs, the idea that a single penny of NHS funding is spent on repairing something as fragile, ephemeral and medically useless as a woman's hymen is absurd.
Only where a young woman has been raped or violently sexually assaulted can there even be the slightest justification for the NHS to pay for such a procedure. And yet in 2005-2006, the NHS clearly decided otherwise time and time again.
So who are these women who are seeking to have their virginities restored? According to the figures, they are "immigrants and British women of ethnic origin".
Well, speaking as a British woman of ethnic origin, let me make it clear. The British NHS should simply not be paying for a cosmetic procedure that is unnecessary, demeaning to women and totally at odds with modern British culture.
The report accompanying the figures is too politically correct to identify the religion of the women who have had the operation, but it's my informed guess that most of them - all of them, perhaps - will turn out to be Muslim.
As the daughter of parents who arrived in Britain from Pakistan in the mid-Sixties, I'm a Muslim myself but I'm appalled by the sort of cultural pressures these women must be under to seek such a procedure.
But I'm also angry that the NHS has agreed to carry them out. By paying for and performing such operations, the NHS isn't furthering the integration of the Muslim community into the British way of life; in fact, it's doing quite the opposite.
It's effectively condoning an increasingly fundamentalist Islamic culture that is patriarchal, regressive and increasingly demeaning to women. Surely that has no place in the Britain of today? As a British Muslim I find 'virginity repairs' on the NHS dangerous, demeaning ... and utterly indefensible (more) By Saira Khan
Mark Alexander
